Cinema and Media Studies

This course explores games created by, for, or about the Black diaspora, though with particular emphasis on the United States. We will analyze mainstream “AAA” games, successful independent and art games, and educational games. Beyond video games, we will take a comparative media studies perspective that juxtaposes video games with novels, films, card games, board games, and tabletop roleplaying games. Readings will be drawn from writing by Frantz Fanon, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Lindsay Grace, Saidiya Hartman, Sarah Juliet Lauro, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, Frank B. Wilderson, and others.

The emphasis of the course will be on critical theory and cultural studies approaches to Black games. This combination of topics may seem counterintuitive insofar as games are sometimes approached as a lightweight cultural medium whereas Blackness is a serious cultural, sociopolitical, and historical concept. Resisting this frame, we approach games as a form that enables experiments with life in a historical moment characterized by digital media, telecommunication networks, and racial capitalism. This is not a course for the craven.

This seminar draws on media technology studies, game studies, and feminist science studies to think about care as a concept that can help re-frame our understandings of contemporary technology. The class considers media representations of caring technologies: technologies that give care and technologies we care for and about. We will also be concerned with how care itself is mediated by technology: on whose behalf do technologies care? What does technology care about? What does it mean to care in a technogenic world? Readings and assignments will draw on video games, animations, and films, but also treat technoscientific objects as media objects: machine learning algorithms, decaying infrastructures, and medical devices are designed and calibrated to mediate flows of information and material, producing ways of seeing, knowing, and relating. We will address three primary axes of technological care: (1) imaginaries of caring and being cared for by technologies, (2) the care and maintenance of techno-social infrastructures, and (3) technologies that mediate care-giving relationships between people.

A reading-intensive graduate seminar designed to explore key writings by members of the "Frankfurt School," especially Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Particular attention will be paid to writings on aesthetics and politics; art and experience; and film and mass media.

Film noir refers, most generally, to a range of films produced during the 1940s and 1950s in Hollywood that share distinct formal and ideological features. At the same time, it also signals a rich area of inquiry for academic film studies that has motivated new questions, debates and critical approaches. In our course, we will think about noir as a group of films that seem to have within them the sorts of paradoxes that criticism gravitates toward.

This class focuses on old and new ways of recombining, reconstituting and remaking cinema. At this moment a rapidly growing barrage of AI-based algorithms seek to unlock data latent in images. With these new tricks, what tools and viewing situations can we make oriented towards the construction of new moving-image works and logics? At a time when we are perhaps further away from the stable objects of cinema than we have ever been, when digital streaming repackages and recomposes film in front of our very eyes, or when virtual, augmented and mixed realities embed and dissolve cinema's frames in new and virtual spaces, what new positive opportunities for scholarship and creation can we find?

Today we are witnessing a strange convergence between forms previously held to be radical and fringe with the everyday experience of browsing YouTube — the boundaries between found-footage experimental films, underground pirate mashups, illegal documentaries, high-art gallery pieces and rights management dodging super-cuts all seem to suddenly interpenetrate.

This class is open to graduate students regardless of their production, coding, film-making experience. If you have any curiosity around the potentials and mechanisms of computers seeing us, seeing our film and video, helping navigate and bootstrap new digital humanities approaches or just curiosities that shade quantitative or algorithmic, join us in this class — there's important work to be started here.

This course will provide a survey of the themes and aesthetics of African American cinema since the Civil Rights Era. The course will provide an overview of topics that have shaped Black images, intramural reception, modes of production, distribution and exhibition and the unfinished project of developing Black film aesthetics. We will watch films by and about Black people in order to better grasp parallel developments such as Black nationalism(s), Black feminist art theories, queer activism, hip-hop culture, and “post”-racial discourses. As such, we will have weeks on Blaxploitation, the LA Rebellion, ghetto/hood films, romantic comedies, documentary and experimental works in addition to work from artists such as Melvin Van Peebles, Marlon Riggs, Spike Lee, Cheryl Dunye, Tyler Perry, Ava DuVernay, Julie Dash, and Barry Jenkins

Film remakes are, and have been, a ubiquitous phenomenon in popular cinema. Film remakes take many shapes and forms: transnational (from Japan to the US), transcultural (from French to American), trans-modal (from animation to live action), and trans-medial (from games to the cinema screen). This course takes up the remake as not merely a citation, but as a new object that, in repeating, creates new meanings. It treats the remake as a repository where one can not only find new technologies of seeing and showing, but also track changing ways of imagining the world on cinema. For this course, then, the film remake serves as an emblem of difference, one which contains the situated imaginations of films past and present. By studying the remake, the goal of this class is to come out with a better understanding of cinema’s difference from the other arts in its capacity to repeat the same story to produce different results.

This course will explore the evolving relationship between moving bodies and video technologies. From early filmmakers using dancers as test subjects, to movie musicals and contemporary dance for the camera festivals, mediatization of the body continues to challenge the ephemerality of live dance performance. This course focuses on the growing field of screendance, videodance, or dance-on-camera, working to define this hybrid genre and to understand the collaborative roles of choreographer, director, dancer, cameraman, and video editor. This course is both a practical and scholarly approach to the genre of screendance, each component essential to a full understanding and mastery of the other. Course work will be divided between the studio and the classroom. For the studio component, students will learn basic video editing and filming techniques. For the classroom component, students will be asked to watch screendance and read a cross-section of criticism. Assignments will be both technological and choreographic (making screendance) and scholarly (written reflections and a seminar paper).

On the surface, poetry and film may seem to have little in common. But over the course of the twentieth century, many poets took a serious interest in film and engaged with it as screenwriters and critics, as well as in their poetry. Likewise, many filmmakers looked to poetry as a model for how movies could work; for some, poetry (not fiction or drama) was film's artistic next of kin. This course takes a broad, multi-national survey of poetry and film from the 1920s to the 1970s. How did writers and filmmakers understand the relationship between the two mediums? What kinds of resources and challenges did each medium pose to the other? Poets on the syllabus may include Gertrude Stein, H.D., Langston Hughes, César Vallejo, Salvador Novo, Xavier Villaurrutia, Benjamin Fondane, Pierre Reverdy, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Likely filmmakers include Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Sergei Eisenstein, Dudley Murphy, Kenneth Macpherson, Fernando de Fuentes, Maya Deren, Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage. (All texts will be in English; films will be screened with English subtitles. The course will include weekly film screenings outside of regular class meetings.) 

Digital media has changed what work looks like across all sectors while simultaneously facilitating more play than ever before. The particularities of mediation are key to the current blurring of work and play: in our play time, video games and social media are feeling more and more like work, as gamification and content creation increasingly become the primary modes of interaction. And work feels more like a game as bosses are replaced by algorithms and all anyone wants to do is ‘game the system.’ Surveillance ecosystems abound, capturing our data and quantifying our actions, rendering us all working players in a socially mediated video game of life.

Making video games for a living or becoming a social media star are jobs that, while fun and highly sought after, are paradigmatic of the contemporary work environment: precarious, aspirational, passion driven, and full of work and play. What happens to us when we're working and playing, at the same time, all the time? How can the frameworks of mass gameplay and ubiquitous sociality help us theorize the contemporary moment?